Live at Five: Queue the Avatar! Slash Costs!

February 12, 2020

Thomson Reuters has been looking for a revenue hockey stick since Michael Brown and Gene Garlan departed. The company has not been a home run in the innovation department. Palantir Technology did not provide the zoom zoom some stakeholders wanted. The Thomson “labs”. Sorry, no TikTok from those hard working Thomson Reuter wizards.

The fix, however, may be deep fakes, automated news, and some AI sizzle. Reddit, a social information service, posted a link to “Reuters Built a Prototype for Automated News Videos Using Deepfakes Tech.” The write up explains:

Designed as a proof-of-concept, the system takes real-time scoring data from football matches and generates news reports complete with photographs and a script. Synthesia and Reuters then use a neural network similar to Deepfakes and prerecorded footage of a real news anchor to turn the script into a “live” video of the news anchor giving up-to-the-second scoring updates.

The technology comes from Synthesia, founded in 2017. (One of the company’s investors is the Sharktank and video savant Mark Cuban.) The company describes itself as a “next gen content creation” outfit.

You can try the service by navigating to this link. I said I was Nancy. And this fake humanoid delivered a short summary to me:

The company’s Web site says:

Go beyond the regular edit suite … forge more meaningful relationships with your global audiences using Synthesia’ powerful content tools.

Is this the winner Thomson Reuters has been seeking for a decade or so? If the company applies its 10-10-20 formula, that’s possible, just unlikely. If today’s Thomson Reuters can manage some of the Lord Thomson of Fleet magic, the professional publishing and news company could disrupt how news can be generated and streamed at bargain basement rates. Hasta la vista talking heads.

An avatar with real AI will present the news: Objective, content rich, and without the hassles of humans, vacations, benefits, and dealing with wimpy humanoid issues like “my manager is not treating me fairly.”

Worth watching.

Stephen E Arnold, February 12, 2020

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Financial, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.